No I really don't know what happened in '92 - I've heard everything from crime reduced greatly to innocent people being killed....whats the truth ? Maybe somewhere in the middle. My own relatives in Karachi - Urdu speakers and Punjabis who've become Urdu speakers for all intents and purposes - told me that excesses were committed but street crime, bhataa khoriii and organized crime that was associated with MQM was also greatly reduced and then later on the police officers who were involved were selectively killed by MQM.
True. But everyone else (not associated with MQM bore the blunt of operation too and you can guess who) and the result: today the political party doesn't need to ask for votes, even the very firm opposers of its policies and the chief find themselves compelled to vote for them since they remember the treatment meted out to the ethnic group during Operation Cleanup. Neither Rawalpindi nor Islamabad ever had anyone far sighted, objective and rational, in my opinion, hence the FUBAR state of Pakistan.
Read: The conflict between the MQM and the Pakistani state dates back to 1992's "Operation Clean-up," a government- initiated military operation, ostensibly aimed at cracking down on all "terrorist" and "criminal" elements in Sind,
but which effectively became a witch hunt against the MQM. The MQM's charismatic albeit autocratic leader, Altaf Hussain, was forced into exile, and the party which had dominated Karachi politics since its founding in 1984 was forced underground. While sporadic ethnic and sectarian violence had been a permanent feature of the Karachi landscape since 1992, the intensity and organized nature of the 1995 round of conflict was entirely different. Analysts began to compare the situation in Karachi to the insurrection in Kashmir as the death toll during the months of June and July peaked at over 600 people, marking only the beginning of months of carnage that were to follow.
In its attempts to exterminate the militant core of the MQM, the state resorted to a calculated policy of collective punishment — massive pre-dawn "siege-and-search" operations and house-to-house searches that led to the illegal arrest and detentions of over 75,000 men between the ages of 12 and 50. Most of these men, often innocent relatives or friends of MQM activists, were blindfolded with their own shirts, paraded down to the local police station, and tortured or beaten until their families paid an extraction fee for their release. The state's counterinsurgency measures also included outright murder — in the daily newspaper reports of the deaths of MQM militants, "killed in police encounters" became an accepted euphemism for blatant extra-judicial killings. As Karachi's citizens endured conditions of unprecedented terror and harassment, the growing economic crisis was aggravated by MQM's calls for general strikes — 25 in 1995 alone — paralyzing the city at a cost of one billion rupees a day.
In the months that followed, the MQM Party was crushed — its workers arrested or forced underground, their families brutalized. An army press campaign against the MQM "exposed" MQM torture chambers, and stories of rape and extortion flooded the front pages. That half of these stories were true made the exaggerated and fabricated claims all the more believable. Despite military backing the dissident group, known as the "real" or Haqiqi faction of the MQM, failed to gain any following at all.
Since the Muhajir community as a whole bore the brunt of a program of systematic intimidation and harassment by the state, even those Muhajirs who had previously not supported the MQM, or did not believed in the politicization of their Muhajir identity, now felt that they had no choice but to support Altaf's MQM. The Battlefields of Karachi: Ethnicity, Violence and the State
You want people to remember Pakistan army and Punjab rangers with respect even after what they did? They won't, its latched too deep in their memory. Make sense of it, like psychology's idea of its all in the childhood, much of what you see now in severe opposition to law enforcers (even they do good) comes from that time period. Mistakes made by excessive (and illegal) use of power aren't rectified by further use of force, the top brass doesn't seem to understand that.
P.S If you want to know whether peace was restored after that operation, look at what kept happening in Karachi in 1995-96.
